Digital Rights Watch.

Standing up for Australians' digital rights

Get a VPN

Digital Rights WatchApril 12, 2017Comments are off for this post

From 13 April 2017, all Australian telecommunication providers are required to collect your metadata and provide it to your Government. Many interactions we have in the digital world are being collected and stored by our communications providers, all without adequate safeguards. This program requires no warrants, has very little oversight and has received condemnation from human rights experts worldwide.

That’s why we’re declared this Thursday as a national day of action – we’re calling upon Australian citizens to educate themselves about the scale of this surveillance and take precautions accordingly. If the government wants to surveil its citizens, then we’ll do everything in our power to equip people to circumvent that surveillance.

We declare Thursday 13 April to be National Get A VPN Day.

It’s time to protect yourself. It’s time to get a VPN.

Step 1: know what a VPN is and why you need one

A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that encrypts the traffic going to and from your computer. Under normal circumstances, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can witness, collect and store all of this traffic as it passes through their servers. By using a VPN, your ISP only sees one source of traffic – the VPN. Since the mandatory data retention scheme relies on your ISP handing over this data to the government, you can stop this happening even before it begins.

Put simply, a VPN is a paid service for funnelling your digital life through a handy opaque pipe, free from the prying eyes of your government.

Step 2: find yourself a good VPN

As with any service provider, it’s hard to figure out which is the best one for you. And we’re not in the business of necessarily endorsing any one brand. But what we can do is point you in the right direction.

When choosing a VPN provider, it’s important to take into account the key issue relevant to government surveillance: do you trust the company providing the service? Do they make it part of their privacy policy to not keep access logs of your interactions with their service? Do they operate within the jurisdiction of one of the Five Eyes countries? Do they have a history of handing over user data to governments when compelled to do so? Do they accept Bitcoin or other anonymous payment types?

Here’s a list of lists that could also be useful in your selection of a VPN provider:

Step 3: help us spread the word about National #GetaVPN Day

A major concern that we have about the mandatory data retention scheme is that the majority of Australians are unaware of the scale of these operations. Huge amounts of their personal data is being hoovered up in the name of national security, and it’s time they understood how to protect themselves. You can help us get the word out.

9 thoughts on “Get a VPN”

Steph April 12, 2017 at 8:40 pm

Nice post. step1 &2: Basically, if the government and ISPs themselves weren’t involved in it directly, just using your Google Chrome or Firefox in private/incognito mode would have been enough but since that’s clearly not the case here, VPNs like ivacy, express and nord would seem to be the only possible solution

Step3: I’m sharing it as we speak.

Step 4: Let’s just say it’s a shame that we, the users have to resort to stuff that kinda puts us on a crossroad with the government and the ISPs.

Cosy Cool April 12, 2017 at 9:43 pm

I tried 3 different VPNs recently. My ADSL speed here in the glorious cable free zone of Australistan is 13mbps usually, around 2-3mbps on a VPN i.e. useless except for email. Now what?

Emily Jones April 13, 2017 at 12:27 am

he best way to keep your self protected is through a VPN, a lot of people would argue about its legitimacy and reinforce that metadata retention law is to be used in federal court proceedings to counter terrorism and cyber criminal activities. Do not forget the US did the same and they landed every common internet user to the dirt of user profiling i.e. the business of selling users online data such as browsing history, internet spending or purchasing power, preferences, health & other significant information.

I use https://traceless.me and can strongly recommend them. Their support helped me a lot to get started with VPN and set it up on all my devices. Now only my smart fridge needs vpn as well!

@John Herres, there is no such thing like free cake. Furthermore Windscribe logs your connection data and keeps logs. You can get a free VPN but if you put some thought into it how it can be free you will quickly find out why that can’t work out. Bandwidth and server maintenance is expensive so the company offering that must have some way to make money. So they either inject advertisement into your traffic or sell your traffic in one way or another.

jw April 14, 2017 at 7:25 pm

d/l the TOR browser

add May 4, 2017 at 10:41 am

I use a free service….

its called ” use someone else’s computer”

Sabrina February 8, 2018 at 12:35 am

Can I please ask a quick question… hiding from your local parliamentarian may be one thing, I’m not too concerned about my government, it’s other data collection places, sales agencies etc. Would a VPN protect me from those who want to sell my private information to third parties, or advertisement websites? If so, I’m keen.